10 Video Content Ideas for your Business: Video Marketing Strategy

10 Video Content Ideas for your Business: Video Marketing Strategy

Good ideas give birth to good content. And there is a big need for good quality video content in the market. We see too many live videos and mobile phone videos with no purpose, no message to convey and no value addition to the audience. But inspite of all the not-so-useful content, video viewership is growing.

Earlier this year, Techcrunch reported that Facebook users watched 100 million hours of video every day. With all this action around videos, I think you can stand out and make a mark for yourself if you create awesome video content. In fact I think the chances of you standing out is better now than it was a few years ago, with more users watching videos with better connectivity. But you can stand out only if you are able to create value-adding, meaningful and creative video content.

I have listed below 10 proven ideas for business video content creation. You could use these ideas as a starting point of your video marketing content planning sessions. But as you create more videos, you will get better at it and come up with more content ideas that are relevant to your business. Remember, there are no good or bad ideas for video content creation. Any video idea that can help your potential customer or your online audience is a good idea.

10 Video Content Ideas for your Business: Video Marketing Strategy

1. Videos with Educational Content

Educate your audience. People like to learn as much as possible about products and services before they make a buying decision. When you educate them without bias and in a ‘non-salesy’ approach, the likelihood of them buying from you increases. In their mind, you become a ‘trusted’ source of information. You occupy good mind space as a brand that genuinely helps them by giving good and useful information.

Some educational video content ideas:

Educate your audience about how to make an informed buying decision (keep it unbiased).

2. Videos about your business

Video footage of backstage scenes are always popular. That is the reason we love that extra footage at the end of movies and sitcoms. Create some backstage footage of your business and showcase it to your audience. Let people learn about your company’s culture – what you believe in, how you operate, your values, your ethics, your processes, etc. Being transparent about your business to your audience increases your brand equity and trust factor. This might also help you recruit the right talent and get the right partners for your business.

3. Videos about your product features

Create videos about the top features of your product/services. Keep one video for each feature. This way you can create a series of short videos which can increase anticipation and keep your audience coming back for more. This also helps you focus on one feature and dive deeper into the details.

Keep it simple, don’t get too technical. Video reaches a wider audience, so make sure you understand the comprehensive capacity of your audience before getting too technical. Highlight only the features of your product that solve the problems of your audience. The script should focus on ‘why this features solves your problem’ rather than ‘how cool this feature is’. You might have a great feature but if it does not solve your customers’ problem directly, better not talk about it in a promotional video. For a marketing campaign to be successful, it should always be about the audience and not about you.

4. Videos with Industry News

You could do a weekly or fortnightly recap of key events, important updates and new developments in your industry. Do not talk about your product or your company here. Just focus on the industry and think about what news will make sense to your audience and what will be useful for them. This will help you gain more traffic, and position you as a ‘thought leader’ in the industry.

5. Videos with Influencers

One of the best and easiest ways of creating good video content is by partnering. When you have more than one person, you have more than one thing to say. Interviews are a great way to add value to your audience, if you are able to find the right kind of influencers in your industry. Have a prior discussion with your interviewee and come up with a list of questions which your audience will potentially have in mind and ask those questions. Make sure you add your own thoughts and inputs to each discussion. With growing video conferencing technology around the world, your guest need not be next to you, you can conduct interviews with anyone around the world using tools like Skype, Blab, etc. and have the recorded version of that video posted on your website, blog and Youtube channel.

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6. Videos that answer questions

You could create a video series on ‘Question & Answers’ related to your industry, product or line of service. Answering questions will not only help your audience in a big way but will also increase your search engine visibility, because most searches in Google are questions that people have.

Creating a list of questions for your Q&A video series:

Whenever you (or your team) have a conversation with your customer, make note of the questions they ask.

Whenever you create content, at the end of every video/blog ask your audience what else they would like to learn about.

7. Videos with customer stories

People love watching other people’s stories. They love watching the opinions of others who have undergone a similar experience or purchase process. That is why product review videos by users play a key role in eCommerce. Google’s official blog reports that 1 in 4 shoppers say online videos are their go-to source for gift ideas and that 32% of shoppers say that they plan to use online video for purchase decisions during this year’s (2015) holiday season. Having a customer testimonial video or a review video could help your customers make that buying decision.

There are couple of ways you could create videos with customer stories:

User-generated videos: You could crowdsource your video content by asking your customers to send you videos of how they used your product, how they like it, what they like to see improved, etc. Of course, you need to incentivise them enough to make them take the effort of creating this valuable content for you. You could give a freebie or a discount or a gift for every video you get. Also, make sure you simplify the process for them, making it easy for them to create and send this video content to you. Many times, it’s the technical problems that keep customers from creating these videos. Make it easier by using tools like VidRack on your website which helps users record the videos from any device with a simple click.

Videos of you interviewing customers: If you have a happy customer who is so thrilled with your service and your product that they do not mind sharing their experience, make sure your interview them and record it. Having your existing customer become an advocate for your company can be more effective than any marketing technique you can come up with.

8. Videos of webinars and training sessions

Recorded webinars can be a good source of video content. Most webinar tools today like GoToWebinar, Webex or Hangouts will give you a recording of the webinar. You can package this video with some intro slides, quick edits, etc. and make it available for your audience. Record your training programs and conference sessions. This will not only increases your influence, but also positions you as an authority on the subject.

9. Live videos

Live streaming is one of the fastest growing trends of digital marketing today. Twitter’s Periscope app, which helps you stream live from your mobile, reached 10 million users in just 4 months. In fact, it had 1 million users in the first 10 days! Facebook’s product manager says that people spend more than 3x time watching videos that are live, than videos that are not live. So, take out your mobile phone and start recording some live videos for your business audience.

Key points to remember when recording a live video:

Make sure you are sharing something that it useful to your audience. If you have nothing to say, don’t say it.

Do not worry about perfection, camera shakes or lighting. In Live video, it is ok to be imperfect, as long as you make sense and add value.

Some of the live video situations that could work well for businesses are – breaking news, event or conference experience, press conferences, travel notes and product launch.

Behind-the-scenes: As we discussed earlier behind-the-scene videos can be exciting and captivating. You could do a live video of a walk-through of your business premises, factory, production unit, employees work areas, etc. to give your audience a feel of your business. This can help you connect with them at a deeper level.

10. Repackage Existing Content

Finally, this is one of my favourite ways of creating video content – repurposing existing content. Take your existing content and convert them into videos. For example, you can take your blog post, explain it to your audience, record as you explain it and you have a good-looking, value-adding video for your marketing campaigns. Since you have anyway spent time creating that good content, it is smart to maximise the reach by packaging it into video format. You can convert most of your existing content into videos. For example, you can convert your photos into a video by adding some transitions, you can convert your image designs into a video, you can convert your product pics and brochures into a video. Maximise every piece of content and think of ways in which you can convert them into video format.